The inventive concepts described herein relate to a driving method of a memory controller, and more particularly, inventive concepts relate to a memory controller driving method capable of performing a wear leveling on a nonvolatile memory and to a nonvolatile memory device controlled by a memory controller.
A semiconductor memory device may be generally classified as either volatile or nonvolatile. Volatile memory devices are characterized by the loss of stored data upon a power-off condition, and examples thereof include dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and static random access memory (SRAM). On the other hand, nonvolatile memory devices are characterized by the retention of stored data upon a power-off condition, and examples thereof include read only memory (ROM), electrically erasable programmable ROM (EEPROM), and flash memory. Among nonvolatile memory, flash memory device in particular considers to exhibit advantages of relatively fast read speeds, low power consumption, and mass storage capacity.
To efficiently manage file data and to improve system performance, a memory system including a nonvolatile memory may store data in a buffer area before storing it in a user area. This program technique may be advantageous to reduce the number of merge operations or the number of block-erase operations. However, a space of the buffer area may be insufficient in the case of an increase in the size of file data to be stored, and a performance of a memory system may be degraded as a result of frequent transfers of the file data between the buffer area and the user area. Also, a wear level of the buffer area may be sharply increased as compared with the user area.